The Mojang Website has word that the phenomenal success of Minecraft continues, revealing the indie construction game has now sold more than eight million copies on the PC. To put this in perspective, they note that according to the Wikipedia, this makes it the ninth bestselling PC game of all time, ahead of such luminaries as StarCraft II, Myst, and Diablo II. In response to this, Notch has provided a message, which is either encoded, or really badly mistyped: "69I960EHE0A4A0IVG0EHE02500R4R0G1T30PLJ00V6V0EHE0V1U01V10U5U0VGV0V4R."

minecraft is pretty trashy, but every boy with a brain likes building and destroying, and the virtual lego market is a virtual wasteland. so here it is, ruled by an independent game. that's okay-ish.

but comparing the sales to myst or whatever is roughly stupid. it is like comparing the ticket sales of gone with the wind to SAW, or the players of half life to farmville. or the ad buys of the bachelorette to the cosby show.

every year these sorts of records are broken because of economic and population changes rather than what anybody did. that is why smart people invented ideas like "per capita" and "adjusted for inflation". and why dummies believe that the last "highest grossing ever", or most popular movie ever actually was so when it kind of wasnt.

I think we've all forgotten a little just how the number of computers have changed over 10 and 20 and 30 years. compare the sales of myst per windows computer at the time to sales of minecraft per windows computer now. we'll see why myst is a big deal and minecraft is just another game.

PS: that "best selling PC games" article is typical of an obscure wikipedia article: incomplete and misleading because it is maintained by retards.